Linkin Park studio album collection to be released on January 15

Everyone's got their opinion. I support the band when it comes to their music. But when it comes to some choices, I get really annoyed.

For example, the LITE music video. They totally messed that one up. The video was average and the worst part was how the band wasn't even in it. Another complaint is how badly the promotion for singles have gone this album cycle. Other than BID, every other single was not promoted or announced. Or if they were announced, their dates got changed. LITE was a total failure when it came to singles. The music video was meh and there was no announcement that it had released. If that song was promoted properly, it would have become a major hit for the band. Castle of Glass had a release in the month of December and now I believe it's been pushed back to Feb.
Another thing would be how the band haven't played many songs from the new album yet like I'll be gone or Roads Untraveled or even Powerless for that matter.

So yeah, people have their "ugh" moments where they criticize the band although I also find how people call the band "sellouts" cause of this compilation album absolutely ridiculous.

 

I never said you have to support them blindly, I just pointed out the fact that in a fan site you expect to see friendly- constructive commenst about lp an not people saying that they suck now.

 

Wow. Shadow Of The Day is indeed significantly different. That is unexpected!

In fact, it's enough of a different mix to actually change the vibe of the track slightly, in my opinion.

 

Is the Studio Collection remastered as well?

 

Known changes so far:

-High Voltage is a live version, and it's NOT the London 2001 one from LPU 2.0.
-No Roads Left has a new drum loop that runs throughout the first part of the song.
-Shadow of the Day's synth pad part has been replaced with strings (the strings were already found later in the song, but they've been added to the earlier choruses as well, at the expense of the part Joe normally plays).

 

Where are you guys finding NRL and Across the Line at, I clicked the Studio Collection and it just brought up the studio albums.

SotD sounded great at first, but the strings at every part gets to be a little much.

 

Has anyone listened to the new "No Roads Left" track off of Minutes to Midnight Deluxe Edition? I'm having mixed emotions about it.

 

I don't like it, either.

Do like the updated Across The Line, though.

 

For the Audiophiles, regarding ATL: The iTunes version seems to be a new one with full quality. The spectrogram stops at 22 khz while the LPU9 one cut at around 16khz.

 

Remastered songs usually tend to just be louder and more compressed.

 

Yeh, interesting topic this! A couple of points of clarification about the remastering process and about the edits and changes that people are noticing!

(1) Although we are talking about these albums being "remastered" (and they are new masters to a certain extent), this isn't entirely, 100% accurate. "Remastered" suggests that the whole album was sent through the mastering process again. In other words, the unmastered mixes from Hybrid Theory, Meteora, Minutes To Midnight, and A Thousand Suns would all be dug up from the archive, and sent to a mastering engineer (who may or may not be the same mastering engineer who mastered the original version), and the end result would be a new, different master. This master is unlikely to sound different to 90% of casual listeners, but it will be different. An example would be reissues of classic albums such as Thriller, or The Joshua Tree, or Sgt Pepper, where the tracks are remastered by a mastering engineer and the result is a subtly different, "improved" end result.

This isn't what happens with "Mastered for iTunes", as far as my understanding of the process goes.

Let me compare the two situations:

Normal Remastering Process:
Step 1 - Original master recordings are unearthed from archive
Step 2 - Recordings are REMASTERED by a mastering engineer
Step 3 - Masters are made at a high sample rate (higher than CD)
Step 4 - Masters are chopped down to CD standard
Step 5 - Masters are delivered for physical CD production or digital upload. ITUNES RECEIVES MASTERS IN STANDARD CD QUALITY.

"Remastered for iTunes" Process:
Step 1 - THE SAME Masters that were used for the original CD and digital release are unearthed from the archive. These are at a higher sample rate than CD.
Step 2 - Instead of chopping these down to CD standard, these original, high quality masters are sent straight to iTunes. ITUNES RECEIVES MASTERS IN ORIGINAL HIGH QUALITY.
Step 3 - iTunes then performs it's usual format conversion, using the high quality masters, instead of the lower quality CD masters.

As you can see from the above situations, the "Mastered for iTunes" doesn't actually involve a remastering or the creation of a new set of masters. What it does involve, is the sending of the original, high quality masters STRAIGHT to iTunes, without any reduction in quality. In theory (though not always in practice), you should have the EXACT same album as the one that was released before, just at a slightly higher quality. No edits. No changes to mixing. No changes to the sound of the mastering. Just a higher quality.

(2) So, that leaves us with the question - WHY are some of these tracks different? Most notably, Shadow Of The Day, which is, frankly, a different mix of the song entirely This won't have anything to do with the "Mastered for iTunes" process, these changes (whether deliberate or accidental) will have likely occurred during the original mixing of the album.

My theory - Warner Brothers sent an incorrect version of Minutes To Midnight to iTunes for this new release. Perhaps they had an old, scrapped master of Minutes To Midnight, which features the different mix of Shadow Of The Day, and some other subtle changes to other MTM songs that others are noticing. My theory is that, due to a clerical mistake, an incorrect version of MTM was sent to iTunes.

This is only my theory, and may be totally out, but to be clear - the dramatic differences that we hear in a song like Shadow Of The Day or No Roads Left are unlikely to have been edits made for this release. More likely, they were alternative mixes made at the time of the release, which never saw the light of day, and have now been accidentally released (again, just my theory!).

For those interested enough to have read through that ridiculously long post, I will be running a few comparison tests of a few songs, and will report back with some findings (and, if you're all incredibly lucky, a quick video explanation of the process - joy of joys!)